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March 07, 2011

“Wallaby” Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool now available

Adobe’s job is to help you solve problems, not to get hung up on one technology vs. another.

Millions of people have honed their Web animation skills in Flash, and now their customers want content that can run anywhere, including on non-Flash-enabled devices. Accordingly Adobe’s releasing “Wallaby,” an experimental Flash-to-HTML5 conversion tool. For now it’s aimed at WebKit-based browsers (notably Safari & Chrome):

The focus for this initial version of Wallaby is to do the best job possible of converting typical banner ads to HTML5. Wallaby does a good job of converting graphical content along with complex, timeline-based animation to HTML5 in a form that can be viewed with browsers using a WebKit rendering engine. Supported WebKit browsers include Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod).

Wallaby’s design goal was not to produce final-form HTML ready for deployment to web pages. Instead it focuses on converting the rich animated graphical content into a form that can easily be imported into other web pages in development with web page design tools like Dreamweaver.

The tool is new & presently limited (e.g. no ActionScript conversion), but the team welcomes your feedback on how it should evolve.

Having come here specifically to build standards-based Web animation software*, I’m delighted to see this release and a ton of other HTML5 initiatives from Adobe. As long as the company puts solving customer needs ahead of politics, I predict good things.

Update: Here’s the original demo from Wallaby’s sneak peek back in October:

* Back then, in 2000, we were assured that widespread SVG support was *riiiight* around the corner. Sometimes it takes a while for reality to catch up with on-paper standards; c’est la guerre.

This rocks. Now we can leverage Flash to bang out animations, transitions, rollovers and drop them into the html5 framework in a fraction of the time it would take to do the same things manually. Huge. Please thank the dev team for me!

Actually it brute force dumps a pile of SVG items when it could and should use scale and 2d css3 transforms. Looking fwd to that added finesse guys… or some guidance on how to trigger wallaby into converting with that outcome.

[I’m not any kind of HTML expert anymore, and I don’t have a lot of details, but I’ve been told that the app uses SVG to get better rendering performance on mobile Safari (at least relative to Canvas). It would be good to fact-check that belief via the Wallaby forum. –J.]